


take my hand; we'll do it all again

by gendzl



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, Amnesiac Stiles Stilinski, Fluff and Angst, Injury Recovery, M/M, Medical Inaccuracies, Relationship Negotiation, like...out the wazoo. so many medical inaccuracies, magical bullshit but only at the beginning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:41:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23448715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendzl/pseuds/gendzl
Summary: He’s been jostled. And is no longer on an IV. He's lost his meds and somebody rudely jostled him awake and he's working his way up to being pissed about both of those things when he arches his neck around and catches sight of possibly the most attractive man he’s ever seen in his life.Seriously. This guy is so his type ithurts."Uhm."The guy grins. "It’s good to see you.""It’s good to see you too—trust me, you have noideahow good—but, uh, I still don’t know who any of you are."The grin widens. "Chris."Oh shit. Oh my god. This is his husband. This beautiful man is hishusband.Holy shit."Holy shit."
Relationships: Chris Argent/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 26
Kudos: 156





	take my hand; we'll do it all again

**Author's Note:**

> Uhhhhhhhh????? I have no explanations or excuses. I've never watched the show, but that won't stop me. I've read...so much fic, y'all. ALL OF THE FIC. In that vein, welcome to Whose Fanon Is It Anyway? the fic where everything is made up and "canon" doesn't matter.
> 
> This is very much a WIP, and while I have a general idea where it's going, I'm not sure when I'll get there. Emotionally invest at your own risk. Oh, and the rating is mostly for language, though that may change in the future. Not sure. We'll find out together!

Stiles rises to consciousness slowly, over and over again.

He hears voices often, but can't quite manage to open his eyes and investigate before he's pulled back down.

Eventually he opens his eyes to an empty room. _Hospital_ , he registers, groaning heavily. He's out again moments later.

It is the middle of the afternoon ( _which_ afternoon, he couldn't be sure) before he wakes while anyone else is around to notice, and he spends several minutes after the nurse leaves to page the doctor—flatly refusing to answer his rasped questions—floating on a cloud of pain medication and staring in vague horror at his left hand.

There are scars he doesn’t recognize (one particularly gnarly one twisting its way from the back of his wrist to the center of his palm, bisecting his thumb in a manner that has him flexing to check that he still has full range of motion; thankfully he seemed to.) but that wasn’t what had him stunned. Like, yeah, that was kind of shocking, but it was nothing compared to the wedding band.

He prods experimentally at his memories.

Nothing.

He's too tired to work himself into a proper panic, and is asleep again before anyone arrives to give him answers.

His leg is broken. His leg is broken and so is his collarbone, three ribs, and a pinky finger. All on the right side. He also has a severe concussion, which he’d kind of already gathered.

Stiles has been here for a week. The hospital has been unable to contact anyone, because he’d evidently been traveling without ID when he was…whatever had happened to break him like this.

So. That was frightening.

Now that he's conscious, and can tell them who he is, hopefully someone would come for him. His dad, certainly. Scott. Maybe his spouse?

He eyes the wedding ring suspiciously. How much time had he lost?

It turns out to be much murkier than it is in the movies. He doesn't wake up knowing what age he is, with one final clear memory to point to as a timestamp. He thought that maybe Obama was president, which turned out to be wrong in the most disappointing way possible.

He remembers graduating college. He remembers losing people, and finding people, and his 19th, 20th, and 22nd birthdays (but not his 21st, which he blames on alcohol more than memory loss). He recalls standing next to Scott at his wedding but not who Scott had married.

His older memories are less spotty. He remembers his childhood, his mother dying, his summers off from school.

It is January 11, 2020. He is 26. Together with all the evidence, they estimate (hesitantly) that he has lost about 4 years.

Long enough to fall in love and get married, apparently.

The next time he wakes, there is a shark beside his bed.

Okay, not an actual shark. But a man so sharply dressed so as to resemble one. He doesn’t have a wrinkle in sight, despite being slouched over in a hard plastic hospital chair.

His expression is sharklike.

Something deep inside Stiles pings out a warning.

The nurses tell him this is his husband. One of them giggled as she left, every time she checked on him. And she checked on him a lot. There was also some winking.

Most often, they were alone.

His leg is broken.

He cannot run.

His supposed husband’s name is Chris. They shared a last name, and it wasn’t Stilinski. He's sort of dumbfounded that he’d met anyone who…what, convinced him to give up his name? No. He wouldn’t marry the type of person who would have had to convince him to do that. Which could only mean that he’d met someone he _wanted_ to give up his name for.

And that was…geez. He knew memory loss didn’t work this way, but how could he have forgotten someone he loved that much?

The hospital also found some records from the hospital in Beacon Hills that informed him "Stiles" was now, in fact, his legal first name. He feels better after that; he was still a Stilinski, sort of.

"Chris" moves like a predator. Stiles in no way trusted that the man is who he says he is, but the nurses all love him, his doctor is relieved by his continued presence, the paperwork he brought with him was technically correct, and Stiles is too broken to sneak out and do any research on his own.

The fact that he claims John is dead only made him more certain. It doesn’t feel like denial, memory loss or not. Dead? The man survived decades on the force, not to mention raising Stiles, only to be taken down by something as mundane as a stroke? Pass. Never happened.

His hospital room doesn't have a phone.

The doctors are ready to release him into Not!Chris’ care after 3 days, but Stiles manages to fake worsening symptoms to buy himself time. He's a better actor now than he used to be: they order more tests.

He is sure that if he could just put it off (‘it’ being leaving the relative safety of the hospital, ‘it’ being facing a life he does not remember, ‘it’ being everything that hurt physically and in other ways that he could not name) long enough, whoever was supposed to have found him in the first place would find him again.

His dad. The real Chris, maybe.

He feels crazy, trusting his instincts when he doesn’t have the memories to go with them. He spends hours lying in bed, aching from his wounds and the utter surety that something is fundamentally _wrong_ with this picture.

He doesn’t know how he knows. But he knows.

He doesn’t dare bring it up.

Time is running short by the time he gets a new nurse.

It's nobody he knows, except that it is. Somehow.

Not!Chris doesn’t register the change, though that's probably due to the fact that it's the middle of the night and Not!Chris is sleeping. (Yes, Stiles did find it weird that nobody ever kicked him out after visiting hours were over. He suspects heavy bribery.)

The colors on the nurse’s hospital ID are off by a few shades, and the clip that holds it in place on the pocket of his light blue scrubs is a legit _roach clip._

At least the blow to the head hasn’t impacted his eye for detail. Yay.

Unlike with Not!Chris, this stranger (they were all strangers) doesn’t give off any bad vibes. Sure, he's a bit glare-y, but did anyone really want to be awake at four in the morning? He sure didn’t.

He arrives with a wheelchair. "We need you to come down for a few more tests," he says quietly.

Stiles glares at him from beneath the itchy hospital blankets. It is _four_ in the _morning_.

"Dude, what the fuck, it’s 4am."

The other guy only glares harder. He gestures meaningfully towards the sleeping Not!Chris. "We need you to come down for a few more tests," he grits out, and it all clicks together through the lingering haze of pain medication.

This is a rescue.

"Help me into the chair?"

The glare recedes a bit. He helps Stiles into the chair silently, taking far more of his weight than Stiles would have anticipated, and never turning his back on the sleeping man in the corner.

Ha. He loves being right.

Ten tense minutes later, Stiles is leaning against the door of a black SUV, broken leg stretched out in front of him on the bench seat while they tear through dimly lit streets.

"Thanks for the jailbreak, dude, but I have no idea who you are."

"We know. We’re working on it." A glance in the mirror. "And don’t call me dude."

Uh. Okay.

Fake!Nurse (which is somehow less concerning than Not!Chris, for unknown instinct reasons) is more focused on speeding than talking, which is fine with him. He's tired. It is four in the goddamn morning.

He can be forgiven for falling asleep.

He wakes up when the door behind his back disappears.

Stiles yelps, flailing, and is caught against a firm chest.

" _Ouch_ ," he complains, still half-asleep.

He’s been jostled. And is no longer on an IV. He's lost his meds and somebody rudely jostled him awake and he's working his way up to being pissed about both of those things when he arches his neck around and catches sight of possibly the most attractive man he’s ever seen in his life.

Seriously. This guy is so his type it _hurts_.

"Uhm."

The guy grins. "It’s good to see you."

"It’s good to see you too—trust me, you have no _idea_ how good—but, uh, I still don’t know who any of you are."

The grin widens. "Chris."

Oh shit. Oh my god. This is his husband. This beautiful man is his **_husband_**. Holy shit.

"Holy shit."

Chris loops his arms around Stiles’ midsection. "Come on. Let’s get you inside, sweetheart. We’re gonna get this figured out."

Chris pulls him gently from the SUV and deposits him back in the wheelchair (did Fake!Nurse _steal_ a _wheelchair?!)._ He draws a hand across Stiles' shoulder blades before squeezing the back of his neck—the gesture full of simple affection—and wheeling him towards a set of glass doors.

He glances up and reads the sign. "A vet? Chris, I’m sure I love you, since we’re married and all, but I’m very tired and very in pain and very amnesia-y, so please tell me you didn’t haul me out of the car on an errand to pick up our dog Fluffy."

Chris’ laugh is as nice as the rest of him. "No. A friend of ours works here. He’s going to get your memories back."

A vet.

…Sure.

Chris. Chris Argent. His husband. His husband Chris.

Chris Argent.

He is perhaps panicking a bit.

At least now he recognizes everyone in the room.

"Well, that didn’t work," Stiles announces bluntly.

They’re all staring at him. Everyone. Deaton, Scott, Lydia, Derek (Fake!Nurse!), Erica, Boyd, Cora, and, inexplicably, his husband: Chris fucking Argent.

They all look…older. The way he looks older in the mirror than he does in his memories. Subtly so, more settled in themselves than anything, and essentially still the same. But different.

Chris is greyer than he remembers.

Cora shifts forward. "You’re looking at us like you know us, now. It worked."

Stiles’ gaze flits over to Chris before he can stop himself. They lock eyes. There's a lot more emotion in Chris’ gaze than in his own.

"No, it didn’t," Chris says, voice perfectly even. There's a particular set to his jaw that Stiles feels he should recognize. "You don’t know me."

"I mean. I know you, I just don’t…" he trails off, eyes dropping to the ring on his left hand. Obviously things had changed. "Yeah. I don’t know you."

Nobody speaks for a moment, taking this in.

"I—I think the TBI is real," Stiles says, finally.

"TBI?" This from Erica.

"Traumatic brain injury. Whatever happened to get me—" he gestures at his injuries "—like this, was separate from the magic bullshit."

"You don’t remember what happened?" Derek asks.

The laugh that escapes him is entirely humorless. "Dude, I can’t remember anything from the last 4 years."


End file.
